브레히트적 포스트모던 정치학

Brechtian Postmodern Politics: Luis Valdez's Zoot Suit

Zoot Suit, containing all of Valdez's styles, acto, mito, and corrido, reconstructs Sleepy Lagoon Murder Trial of 1942, the false imprisonment of Chicano youths, and Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 in which a mob of several thousand servicemen beat up zoot suiters and stripped their zoot suit. Valdez chooses pachucos wearing zoot suit as the symbol of cultural resistance and self-definition, and the embodiment of chicano identity. By retelling their distorted story and reconstructing their identity, he deconstructs Alglo-American's negative discourse. Using Brechtian gestures, Valdez appeals his audience to participate in his rewriting of the history. He connects pachuco to resurrected Aztec god and thereby attempts to give his people a history back and ethnic pride. However, Valdez's fundamental goal is not the essentialism but a new complete integration. Cultural nationalism is his strategy of establishing coexistence. The integration doesn't mean a unilateral assimilation but accepting and respecting all differences. Postmodern politics focuses on local narratives and decentered subject, and that is what Valdez tries to carry out with the Brechtian aesthetics of participation. His Chicano characters' identity is not unitary but plural, fluid not fixed, which lies in the third place between American and Mexican. He pursues the multicultural coexistence with this hybrid identity. His postmodern conclusion leads us to recontextualize the history and construct a new present and future beyond the differences.